Anjney Midha

Just as big picture, my life stories.

I was born in India.

I went to high school in Singapore.

And I came out of college to the United States at Stanford for my undergraduate degree.

And when I arrived at campus in 2011, deep learning had just started taking over the world in Silicon Valley.

Andre Karpathy was a computer science TA to Andrew Ng, who was one of the, I would say, modern sort of founding fathers of deep learning.

This idea that you can teach machines to think and without having to give them prescriptive rules.

I got swept up in that moment and started studying.

A lot of my coursework was in machine learning.

My primary department at Stanford was in bioinformatics, which was machine learning applied to healthcare.

I got sidetracked to a venture firm called Kleine Perkins for about four and a half years where I got the chance to work for some of the great investors like John Doerr and Mary Meeker.

Then I left and started my own company.

And as is the case in Silicon Valley, when you start, I mean, I was 25.

I went and raised about $47 or so million from some of the usual suspects, like benchmark and index and so on.

And I thought I was the coolest kid in town.

And I got the beat out of me because we built this incredible technology, which is this AI system that could map any location in 3D, and then the pandemic hit.

And so location-based mapping, 3D mapping,

The only thing you can control is how you react to what happens.

I did feel for a moment like it was bad luck, and then you just have to pick up the pieces and make the best of it.

So I did with my co-founder.